Down To Earth

Editorial. Sunita Narain.
1.I.XVI

Let's respect the
Other

by Sunita
Narain

The year 2015 has
come to an end. This year has been full of events
that are interconnected and foretell our future in
a way that should enormously worry us. And,
hopefully, get us all to rise to the
challenge.

In December, the Paris
climate change talks ended with an agreement far
from ambitious and way off from being equitable.
It has left the world even more vulnerable; the
poor, even more deprived of basic human
development.

Then there was the
Chennai anomaly. Usually dry and desperately
water-scarce, the city sank under water. What a
way for citizens to realise, of this and every
other megacity, of what an increasingly
climate-risky world we are all living in. What a
way to understand that. If we keep mismanaging,
extreme weather events are going to make us all go
under.

Then my city of Delhi,
choked and spluttered, had run out of clean air to
breathe. It has learnt the really hard way that it
must find leapfrog options, combining both
technology and lifestyle choices of mobility
patterns, if it wants to live on something as
basic as breathable air.

2015 has brought home
tough messages. One, environmental issues cannot
be ignored if we want to secure life and health.
Two, development has to take a different path, for
we must—starting now—mitigate its
visibly adverse impacts. Three, since we live in a
planet where warming is now unleashed, unbridled,
what we do must be done at an extraordinary speed.
2015 has done all of us a huge favour: it has been
a tea-leaf reading of our future. Dire warnings we
must heed. But are we?

Let’s take the
Paris Agreement as a symptom. The world today is
hurtling towards two catastrophes, one caused by
our need for economic growth, and the other by
unparalleled and gluttonous consumption that
impels emissions into the atmosphere. These
greenhouse gas emissions, primarily emitted
because we need energy, contain portends of a
future being placed at extreme risk. We already
see how weather variation—linked to climate
change, or not—has jeopardised the
livelihoods of millions of farmers in India in
2015. Farmers are now driven to ultimate
desperation— suicide. These failures, a
combination of poor policies, are now exacerbated
by untimely, weird weather, and have caused so
much human pain.

In this manner, the
development dividend, which is so hard to secure
in the first place, is being lost. And there is
much more to come. Paris, with its weak and
unambitious text, has failed us abjectly. The
already-rich and the becoming-rich have signalled
they don’t want to compromise on their
growth, or consumption, in the interests of the
rest.

Another catastrophe
awaits us — living in a more inequitable,
insecure, and intolerant world. Let’s be
clear. The Paris Agreement tells us, more than
ever, that the rich world has bubble-wrapped
itself, and believes that nobody can prick it or
burst through. To be secure in the bubble,
conversation is restricted to only what is more
convenient. In this age of internet-enabled
information, ironically, the world is actually
reading and being sensitive to less, not more. The
circles of information have shrunk, to what is
most agreeable to listen to. It is no surprise,
then, that in climate change negotiations—in
trade talks, too, or international
relations—there is one dominant
discourse.

The most powerful
nations would like to believe that there is nobody
on the other side. As I wrote from Paris, there
was no longer another side. So, there is no
respect for another’s position. It is
believed the other side is either a terrorist, a
communist or is just corrupt and incompetent.
There is a fatal refusal to fathom, or approach,
opinions or realities that are
different.

In all this, there is
growing inequality in the world. No amount of
growth and economic prosperity is enough any more,
because aspiration is the new God. This means
anybody who is poor is marginalised simply because
they have just not made the grade. There is no
longer space for such “failure” in our
brave, newer, world. It is about the survival of
the fittest, in a way that would have made Darwin
insane.

It is no surprise that
we, in India, are mirroring this grave, new world.
In the last year, the very real plight of the
poor, distressed, flooded, drought-stricken and
famished was banished from our television screens
and newspaper articles. Our world is being
cleansed. If we do not know they exist, we do not
need to worry about their present or future. We
can think about a way of life that benefits us,
solely. This is the true emerging face of
intolerance in an intolerably unequal
world.

This does not make for a
secure future. No. It makes for a bloody war. But
that is what we have to change, now and forever. I
haven’t lost hope. Please don’t as
well.